I challenge them to analyze the game like a dream. In my undergraduate college classroom, I sometimes require all of my students to play a popular game in the weeks immediately following a unit on Freud. You can start by adding a game to your curriculum. We have film studies, now it’s time for video game studies. Not video game classes that analyze game design and mechanics - video game classes that are about analyzing the literature of gaming. We need more video game studies departments that are not about game development and computer programming, but rather about critical thinking. But we need more people to jump on that bandwagon. How can we be more cognizant of the implicit messaging in video games? In my book, FREEPLAY, I try to model a practice and a method of analyzing the underlying psychology of video game narrative.
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These video games are teaching our students how to think about the world, how to make meaning. These video games are shaping the next generation. If video games are shaping the conscious attitudes of an entire generation, we need to start asking difficult questions about the kinds of stories we want to tell. After all, nobody could’ve imagined that the novel would be so important to the future of schooling when they read Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 1605. Video games might even represent the modern examples of storytelling that will eventually become the classics of literature in hyper-connected centuries to come. A good argument could even be made that video games are the new mythology, a kind of non-linear interactive storytelling that shapes the conscious attitudes of today’s youth. On the contrary, video games may be indicative of a shift in the way we construct narrative. But all too often we overlook video games as a meaningless triviality. We take it for granted that we should teach our students how to read books interpretively, how to analyze movies, and how to read the newspaper critically. What if teachers used video games as texts? Let’s think about how we might teach kids to think critically about the underlying messages in commercial games and how we might leverage video games for their ability to engage students and provoke conversation.Īt the moment, there’s far too little critical examination of video games happening in school. Just like a shovel works better than digging with only your hands, game-based teaching tools will enable teachers to reach students in ways we can only begin to imagine.īut let’s approach video games in a different way. While digital games will certainly never replace a great teacher, they are tools that can help teachers do their jobs more effectively.
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